For centuries, fabric articles have been washed using water-based processes. In the last century, this home chore was greatly simplified by the development of the automatic washing machine. However, while greatly simplifying the home laundry process, even the home laundry process using the automatic washing machine still requires a significant amount of presorting fabric articles by color and textiles. Typically whites are washed separately from colored fabrics, and brightly colored fabric articles (e.g., dark reds and blues) from less highly colored articles. Further sorting and handling is required when the fabric articles to be laundered include “dry clean only” articles.
More recently, water conservation efforts and environmental concerns have driven laundry machine manufacturers and laundry detergent manufacturers to reduce the amount of water required in the home laundry process. However, such efforts have focused on reducing water consumption by the wash medium rather than changing the wash medium from a primarily water based process.
In parallel, concerns have arisen around the use of “Perc” (short for perchloroethylene) as the wash medium for the commercial dry cleaning process. These concerns have lead to the development of a significant number of proposed alternatives the Perc-based processes, but to date all other alternatives are still not widely used. Examples include hydrocarbons and liquid carbon dioxide. A more recently proposed option as a replacement for Perc in the commercial dry cleaning field involves the use of siloxanes as the cleaning solution for “dry clean only” fabric articles (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,942,007, Aug. 24, 1999; U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,042,617 and 6,042,618, both Mar. 28, 2000; U.S. Pat. No. 6,056,789, May 2, 2000; U.S. Pat. No. 6,059,845, May 9, 2000; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,063,135, May 16, 2000).
It has been discovered by the present invention that further simplification of the automatic home laundry process and elimination of the reliance on a solely water based home laundry process are possible by using a siloxane based wash medium for the home laundry process. This process allows not only the home cleaning of a consumer's “dry clean only” fabric articles, but also those “machine wash” articles conventionally washed at home in a water wash medium. Further while the consumer may still opt to wash such articles separately, the present invention process allows the consumer the freedom to significantly simplify the home laundry process by washing mixed loads of “dry clean only” and “machine wash” articles, thereby greatly reducing the presorting effort.